Space, City and Post colonialism in the Poetic Discourse of the “Independent Writers of Pernambuco”

In Altas literaturas (High Literatures), Leyla Perrone Moisés reminds us that in the scope of Catholicism the canon acquired the meaning of a "list of saints recognized by the papal authority" which "by extension came to mean the set of literary authors recognized as masters of tradition" (1988, p. 61) .That, undoubtedly, guided the literary studies in Brazil until very recently. These studies ignored non-canonical literary works. In other words, the canonical thinking was oblivious to a rich literary production which was not in accordance with a colonialist view of the academic studies developed in our universities. In this work, we intend to study the literary production of some poets in Recife (Brazil), in the 1980s in relation to the established canon. We focus on the Movement, known as “Independent Writers of Pernambuco” aiming to bring to light a literary movement forgotten by Brazilian academic community.. Our study has a postcolonial perspectives we explore the need to pay attention to literary production by writers who do not always belong to “traditional canon” (Said, 2004). The poetical works of the movement we study may play a vital role in the context of Brazil and Pernambuco. By considering the emerging social responsibilities of writers and intellectuals in an ever more interdependent world, we suggest that studying the movement and its authors who are not much explored by Brazilian scholars we may be decolonizing the knowledge on literature in Brazil. Wetake into account the movement´s relations with Brazilian Northeastern culture and its program of action, dating from 1981, the beginning of the so-called "Lost Decade." The movement had an important voice against the most conservative and traditionalist criticism at that time. We believe that by studying the movement we are offering the opportunity to rethink our Brazilian and Pernambucan literary canon.


INTRODUCTION
In his work Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Edward Said criticizes scholars who tend to consider only the euro-centric works as part of their studies. Said suggests that the inclusion of a broader range of writers in our classroom and in our studies could favor a more democratic form of humanism, because when incorporating more literary works in our studies we may help emancipate and enlighten diversity and new knowledge. In this sense he proposes a more expansive literary canon as strategies to revitalize humanities and the literary studies: "Humanism is about reading, it is about perspective, and, in our works as humanists, it is about transitions from one realm, one area of human experience to another…. and when we go on to expand the area of attention to include widening circles of pertinence" (HDC,80). Moreover, as we see in the epigraph, Said proposes that words as literary works are International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Science (IJAERS) [Vol-5, Issue-5, May-2018] https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijaers.5.5.5 ISSN: 2349-6495(P) | 2456-1908(O) not merely passive figures but vital agents in historical and political change. Intellectuals must be able to realize the role of works of arts and other production in relation to the time and the political situation when the works were written, is very important. It is with this purpose that in this work we study a literary movement in Brazil during the Brazilian dictatorship. The movement was initiated in Recife, the capital city of the state of Pernambuco, in Brazilian Northeast. We consider that it is very important to bring pay attention to this movement and bring to light the importance of it in a historical time in Brazil. We consider that university scholars and researchers need to look toward production which do not belong to the traditional cannon, but which are worth of investigation and studies. Therefore, we agree with Said´s view that we need to go beyond a very traditional canonical look and walk towards new linguistic and literary experiences that demand study and recognition Within a world literary production. Besides, we need perceive the political relevance of displaying the poetical production of the Recife Movement which was almost forgotten by students of literature. This, reflects what Said himself says: " Humanism, I strongly believe, must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.. (HDC,81). The Recife Movement of Independent writers also reminds the reader of Fanon (1972), when he writes in the Wretched of the Earth about the "poetry of revolt" which was a way of bringing awareness to important current events and a form of freedom of speech, expressing individual or group thought. With this in mind we will study the Recife Independent Movement.

II. ORIGIN OF THE MOVEMENT
The end of the 1970s in Brazil was marked by a series of political and cultural factors that resulted in the proliferation of groups and tendencies on the sidelines of official systems of cultural production in extremely distinct ways, but that found in their common axis the fight against the military dictatorship, which was the center on which art and the mobilization of Brazilian society revolved.
It was also a period in which writers, due to the strong surveillance and repression exerted by the state machine on bodies that produced culture, searched other ways for the elaboration, disclosure and diffusion of the literary work in its diverse forms as a way to circumvent the repressive apparatus of the state.
In this context, coming from an oppositional stance towards the system and proposing a final blow in the modernist tradition, an entire generation seeks through the mimeograph and through clandestine printing shops an alternative way to escape the government control and to maintain art as a flag representing the resistance to the culture of silence imposed by the dictators.
This stanceof being on the sidelines of the official systems of production and diffusion of art and of retaking the individuality lost by the Modernist propagandacharacterized the arrival of marginal artists, who placed themselves in the margins of the official publishing system of the country.
It is in this context, unless there is better judgment, that the following decade begins, with the strengthening of street demonstrations in different Brazilian cities, in search of the re-democratization of the nation, such as "Diretas Já" ("Free election right now!"), in 1983, and the rupture of a big part of artists with the traditionalist posture that prevailed in the official education and its institutions.
In this sense, the Movement of independent writers was intimately related to this cultural rebellion of the 1980s in the academic area, more precisely manifested at the First ENEL (NATIONAL MEETING OF STUDENTS OF MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE) held in Salvador, Bahia, in 1980 2 . The movement organized a response to the conservatism that was already rousing even the bastions of the mimeograph generation, delighted with the invitation of big publishing houses to participate in the formal publishing market in 1970s.On this institutionalization of the marginal generation that was initiated in the 1980s, Luiz Carlos Monteiro, in an interview with the website interpoética.com.br, states that: [The generation of the 70s was born on objecting grounds and today is institutionalized. The "marginal" poetry of Chacal is distributed throughout Brazil through official editorial programs that involve public schools. When I participated in the independent movement, I assumed radical ideological and editorial positions, but tried to maintain a dialogue with other groupsthe Generation of 1965, the Poets 2 All the references were extracted from the personal archive of the poet Eduardo Martins and from ESPINHARA, Francisco. Movimento dos escritores independentes. Recife: Editora Universitária, 2000. Certainly due to this beginning of the institutionalization of the mimeograph generation, the authors who were still labeled as "new artists" opted to discuss several questions about the nomenclature through which they were labeled, the relations between art and power and the process of creation in relation to the systems of production and diffusion of the literary work of art, which resulted in the holding of a new meeting in Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, in 1981. This second event counted on the participation of approximately 16 states of the federation. It was in this event that the writers, until then labeled as "new", deliberated for the nomenclature of "Movement of the Independent Writers". They returned to their states of origin with the purpose of promoting local events and of discussing a definition for the authors thus designated, since the term independent had already been mentioned by some historians of literature in relation to some isolated cases of poets of other centuries and of other generations.

III.
EVENTS AND MEETING: THE LETTER OF PRINCIPLES Pernambuco held two of these events at the institution Fundação Casa das crianças de Olinda (Children's House Foundation of Olinda), home of poets of popular culture, popular singers know as cordelistas 4 and "emboladores 5 ", and it was from their deliberations at state level, through the "LETTER OF PERNAMBUCO" that the independent writers reached the following topics of definition at the NATIONAL MEETING OF In the original: A geração 70 nasceu em bases contestatórias e hoje se encontra institucionalizada. A poesia "marginal" de Chacal é distribuída em todo o Brasil através de programas editoriais oficiais que envolvem as escolas públicas. Quando participei do movimento independente assumi posições ideológicas e editoriais radicais, mas tentando manter o diálogo com outros gruposa Geração 65, os Poetas da Rua do Imperador, a vanguarda local neotropicalista. 3 In the original: 4 Cordelistas-are the poets who practices "literatura de cordel" or "sting literature" very common in the Brazilian Northeast. 5 Similar to "cordelistas" The "emboladores" are oral poets whose practices allow people who, originally, were not very familiar with the reading world to experience literacy practices. Poets need to create a poem in response to a previous one by another author.

IV. THE INDEPENDENTS OF PERNAMBUCO
As one can see the Independents did not define in their "letter of principles" any new canon of aesthetic motivation, in fact, the absence of a canon is what characterized the production of the Movement. The anarchic aspect is consolidated in the politicophilosophical and, mainly, aesthetic positions. Thus, it Here I see a great difference between the authors of the 70s, who were already being institutionalized, and their practice of the minute and ironic poem initiated in our literature by Oswald de Andrade at the beginning of Modernism, and the anticanonical and politicized proposal of the independent writers of the 80s, which translates in the manifest document entitled "Letter of principles" written in the event held in Fortaleza. In the thought of Espinhara and his contemporaries, we note the dislike of the relations of patronage between art, power and history, almost always unfavorable to "ethical and ethnic minorities." For this reason, I think, the movement's "letter of principles" is long and extensive, but assumes, mainly, a libertarian ideological character of art in relation to critical studies and to state control. Here we have, among other factors, one of the reasons that surely led the critics to ignore the poetic production of the period, both locally and nationally, with very rare local exceptions, as we shall see later.
In Recife, we find, together, from the popular poets (repentistas and emboladores) from whom the Independents inherited the characterization of street movement, to even a more reclusive and cabinet sonic like Cícero Melo. Nevertheless, as in all movements, only a half dozen of participants "took the reins" of the activities developed by the Movement, among them Francisco Espinhara, Cida Pedrosa, Eduardo Martins, Héctor Pellizzi and Fátima Ferreira, who organized and executed the projects of open events, publishing and dissemination of the production of the time.
These authors formed the "embryonic group of the Movement" to which joined, among many others These authors saw in this new stance the rebirth of the streets of downtown Recife in what best defines them: the lyrical effusion, since at that time, besides bearing beautiful names, the streets were symbols of resistance to the odor of urine, to the remains of fruits and to the poverty on the floor that came to be confused with the beauty of Capibaribe and, consequently, of the city.
The first events were given in the bookstore Livraria Reler, with the support of the teacher and "famous bookseller" Pedro Américo de Farias, one of the few sympathizers to the ideas of the Movement in its beginning. Incidentally, Flor Pedrosa and Pedro Américo de Farias accompanied some of the Independents even before the movement itself was defined as such. They supported and edited, in the secondary school 2001, the book of poetry entitled Momento Poético (Poetic Moment), in which appear published the first poems by Eduardo Martins (at the time signing as José Eduardo), Cida Pedrosa, Lydia Barros, Raimundo de Moraes, among others.

V. THE INDEPENDENCE IN DOWNTOWN RECIFE It was in downtown Recife that the Movement initiated its street recitals on the bridges, in
Praça da Roda (also known as Praça do Sebo) and in front of Lojas Americanas, on Rua Sete de Setembro, every Saturday morning, at which time the poets took to the streets of the center of the city and occupied the hydrants, making spout the poetry through one of the oldest means of diffusion of the poetic art, orality.
In this way we can affirm that "the new literary work is received and judged both in its contrast as the background offered by other artistic forms, and against the background of the daily experience of life" 8 (JAUSS, 1994, p. 53) because of the closeness that it establishes with its first critic, the common reader, receiver of this work, as well as with the diachronic process that takes place in this relation within a specific context that disregards the traditionalist reading of the text in the offices of academic criticism.
This type of event, singular for a literature that increasingly encases itself in its elitist stronghold, begins to annoy a lot of people, attracting the attention of the most unsuspecting, and even the indifferent and meager media of Pernambuco could no longer silence: THE INDEPENDENTS HAVE ARRIVED!!! They 8 In the original: a nova obra literária é recebida e julgada tanto em seu contraste como o pano de fundo oferecido por outras formas artísticas, quanto contra o pano de fundo da experiência cotidiana da vida arrived and completely altered the literary scene of wellbehaved Recife of the eighties, but the price would be high, very high for the generation.
Hasty evaluations compromised the knowledge of the whole literary production of the time. Yet, some opinion makers such as César Leal (Caderno Viver-DP), Lucila Nogueira (Generation of 65/UFPE), Ângelo Monteiro (Generation of 65/UFPE), Marco Camarotti (UFRPE), Paulo Azevedo Chaves (POLIEDRO-DP) and the greatest supporter of the Independents, the poet Alberto da Cunha Melo, confronted this rashness of many before even reading the production in question, a gratuitous prejudice that the young people suffered accompanied of all kinds of mistrust and senseless discrimination on the part of the holders of the oligarchic cultural power of the State in the foreground, and of the nation in the background.
We We know that the above transcript does not refer only to history or to one or another text drawn in the time and space of literary facts, but mainly to the way of reading, of giving and having knowledge of the literary production of a people as a whole through the literary production of its poets within a certain cut in time, which in fact does not occur, turning to the colonialist criticism to the studies of the works of the colonizer at international and national level. On this, and especially with regard to Brazilian literary criticism of the twentieth century, we can also establish the economic facts, which emphasized the southern and southeastern regions of the country and the cultural issues, which developed as a result of these factors, as elements determinants of the almost absolute absence, in the last fifty years, of great authors, especially poets, and of the great movements that developed in other regions of the nation, especially in the North and Northeast, where the Independent groups concentrated most of their activities.
Add to this that these poets worked against the canon or against the establishment of this as absolute truth. That is, the Independent poets ironically called themselves a "Movement", but did not have an aestheticformal platform that characterized them as such, much less a "guru" or "godfather" who would launch them into the mainstream media and put them in direct relationship with the general public. They probably did not even want such a thing.
In this sense, its history was built by facts created within the natural movement of the authors who participated in it, and was directly linked to the streets and the universities from which they came, given that they came from a meeting of new writers that took place during the I National Meeting of Students of Modern Languages and Literature, in Salvador, Bahia, in 1980(ESPINHARA, 2000.
Certainly, these facts contributed decisively for the Movement, after 30 years, to remain forgotten by Brazilian literary criticism, especially when speaking of poetry and especially of the poetry produced in Brazil in the years of 1980. We should note that this street poetry refers to the city and its spaces as a derivative of the gaze, a normally distrustful, pessimistic look even concerning these relations unleashed between the subject and her/his environment. As an example, the poems Prison Celll64, by Wilson Freyre, Geography of evil (Geografia do mal) by Eduardo Martins and Puppets(OsFantoches) (1972) in the chapter "concerning violence" : "the town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil" (WE,37). This is the Recife described by some poets of the movement In Brazilian Northeast, the "Independent writers" reached, perhaps more efficiently, what seemed to be the pretensions of the first marginal poets of 1970, an almost absolute anonymity.This, except for very rare exceptions in our literature, only began to be broken at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when some critics and poets of national renown begin to cite part of this production in their manuals This is the case of Professor Afrânio Coutinho, who in his Enciclopédia de literatura Brasileira (COUTINHO, 2001(COUTINHO, , p.1119 includes the Movement as an entry and other authors such as Alberto da Cunha Melo, Ângelo Monteiro, César Leal, Aguinaldo Gonçalves, Marcus Accioly, Marco Camarotti, Deonésio Silva, Osvaldo Duarte, Bráulio Tavares, Nagib Jorge Neto and Marco Pólo Guimaraens, who in their reflections on some works by authors of this period attribute a positive value to the literary production of the Movement, which once again characterizes our critique as laggard, whose blanks are continuous and whose injustices often create insurmountable and harmful gaps. However, the Independents, in disregard of the critical recognition, continued and invaded the academic circles, took Pernambuco's production to universities and to schools. FAFIRE (Faculdade de Filosofia do Recife [College of Philosophy of Recife]) was the stage of several events of the Independents, as well as UFPE and UNICAP (Universidade Católica de Pernambuco [Catholic University of Pernambuco]). The bars, the doors of the cinemas and the theaters could no longer ignore the presence of the writers.
They were in every nook and cranny, but they centralized, as we have already mentioned, in Praça do Sebo, on Rua da Roda, their collective releases, and in the bookstore Livraria Síntese, on Rua do Riachuelo, with the support and generosity of the bookseller Sueli, their individual releases, which also occurred less frequently in Tarcísio Pereira's bookstore Livro 7. While Livro 7 was essential for the consolidation of the "Generation of 65" of poets from Pernambuco and held its importance for the Independents, Livraria Síntese, Praça do Sebo, Beco da Fome and the front of the Americanas store on Rua Sete de Setembro (whose manager made throw many buckets of water on the poets in order to stop the literary events on Saturdays) were the axis of the identity and literary citizenship of the Independent Writers along with the streets of downtown Recife. There, the Movement went on to release 29 books in a single year, and circulated more than 10 "nanico 11 " newspapers, among them Americanto, Lítero-Pessimist, Contágil, Mandacaru, Cochicho, Lírica, Poética, Cântaro and Poemar, which became better known by virtue of a more active participation of their publishers.
If newspapers and books were important for the consolidation of the spaces and the artistic production of the Movement, other fronts were organized in order to open trenches for the "battle for the poem" that the poets waged daily and which became one of the leaflets launched together by Eduardo Martins, Francisco Espinhara and Pedro do Amaral.
These activities include: book fairs, clotheslines, exhibitions of illustrated poem-posters, recitals, poetry rain, happenings and performances that took over the historic center and revitalized not their concrete skeletons but the transubstantiating essence of the city. A real apology to what in the most simple and crystalline way represents the culture of Recife: lyricism.
A true embolism of much that seemed dead in the culture of the region and that reappears with force and magic by the hands and the voice of the youth in spaces generated with the support of those who knew to receive them, among them: Suely, from the bookstore Síntese, who had by several times the fronts and adjacencies of her establishment occupied by the Independents in releases, recitals and expositions of poems, in addition to others that were conquered by the Movement, such as Rua da Roda.
In this period, Alberto da Cunha Melo points out, in his column, in the newspaper Jornal do Commercio, the importance of the work of the Movement in regards to the rescue of the orality of our poetry. This seems to us to be a crucial point of the Movement, because it identifies it with the practices of the popular poets.
This artistic trait comes from the Northeastern culture, due to the proximity of the Group with the cordelistas and emboladores poets who occupied the Children's House Foundation of Olinda, where the Independents went on to hold two regional meetings in 1981 and 1982, respectively. This aspect, very well represented in the group by poets such as Wilson Freire and Adelmo Vasconcelos, brought to the recitals the taste and flavor of the popular culture connected to cordel (string literature) and to the singing, although it was not the single mark of the work of these authors.

VI. DISPERSAL The
Independents Movement grew vertiginously, despite the prejudice and ignorance of those who came to doubt their existence as a Movement. It incorporated other arts like music, painting and cartoon. It opened new range of interaction, but, with the same speed with which it grew, the Movement succumbed, after the dissolution of the embryonic group, around 1987, with the departure of Eduardo and Espinhara to the state of Rondônia, Cida to the countryside of Pernambuco, Héctor to the state of Maranhão and with the estrangement of Fatima from the literary gatherings of the time.
Like all movements deprived of their minimal organizational framework and having many occasional adepts, the Independents saw innumerable of their dreams bogged down in the vastness of the mangroves of Recife and saw hitchhikers and active opportunists boast of a pseudo participation in the Movement, that many saw at first with irony, but later, when the city seemed to have assimilated its existence and its outbursts, they obtained positive references from academia and the media, giving testimony as participants or including themselves in a history that did not belong to them.
For this reason, and for much more than that, believing that the world takes its turns and that it is necessary to return to the past in its calm waters, we resolve to insist on this rescue, because the past waters, contrary to what many think, only move mills, interminable and uninterrupted, deep and agile like these winds that blow us the air of history to renew and reread these times of "youth and faith."